ianuarie 01, 2014

There’s a cat on the mat

'Our approach to thinking, from the early days of the computer era,
focused on the question of how to represent the knowledge about which
thoughts are thought, and the rules that operate on that knowledge. So
when advances in technology made artificial intelligence a viable field
in the 1940s and 1950s, researchers turned to formal symbolic processes'....'While the successes behind subsymbolic artificial intelligence are
impressive, there is a catch that is very nearly Faustian: The terms of
success may prohibit any insight into how thinking “works,” but instead
will confirm that there is no secret to be had—at least not in the way
that we’ve historically conceived of it. It is increasingly clear that
the Cartesian model is nothing more than a convenient abstraction, a
shorthand for irreducibly complex operations that somehow (we don’t know
how) give the appearance, both to ourselves and to others, of thinking.
New models for artificial intelligence ask us to, in the words of
philosopher Thomas Metzinger, rid ourselves of an “Ego Tunnel,” and
understand that, while our sense of self dominates our thoughts, it does not dominate our brains.'